B Traven

 New video about how much I love his work:

Nightcrawling vlog

 

The Acrobat: Foregone Books review

 https://youtu.be/y3sRXzGPJjg

The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler

 The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler

This is a science fiction novel about our inner space, the fantastic and unknowable parts of our existence here on earth.

It is not a spoiler to say that it is about octopus intelligence. It is a science fiction speculation based on things people have observed about the behavior of octopuses.
But there is so much more going on in this novel.

It is set sometime in the future. It doesn’t feel like a remote future, it could be 50 years from now.  Ray Naylar doesn’t so much create a type of 360 complete world in this dystopian future, his is more of a chamber novel with few locations and characters, and about half of the characters are AI machines. But this does not diminish the scope of the book.

There is a palpable feeling of loneliness in the tone of the novel. This loneliness is amplified by the vast forces of power that the human characters must deal with. The scientists in the book are shown to have lonely childhoods. The main character, Ha, was frustrated by a love object that treated her coldly when she was a girl.

There is an AI humanoid, it has passed the Turing Test, but is also lonely and exiled being the only one and presumed dangerous.
There is a sort of remote viewer specialist, who can hack into AI minds without technological tools, just his brain. He is on a lonely mission in a type of work in which one must be suspicious of all others.

The loneliest sections involve a young man who went from the provinces to the big city, complete with the bulk of his parents savings in money and hope only to be captured and enslaved. This part of the story evoked the Death Ship is B Traven fine novel about forced labor of a ship. These parts don’t not top Traven’s horror voyage but in this novel the ship is on automatic. It is run by an AI brain that is encased in an impenetrable ship wheelhouse room. The only humans are the slave workers and the armed guards to keep them in line. The ship goes where it feels it will be able to pull more “protein” out of the depleted seas that it continues to roam.

The seas have been mostly depleted when we enter this world, and giant corporations with their AI technology are in control of the world. Most of the story takes place on an island in the Pacific that one of the corporations has set aside as a protected area of sea life, free from factory farming or the AI ships.

The lonely characters need connection and this is a novel about communication. It considers communication beyond talking and gestures of the moment. It looks at stored communications, like this text, that can carry knowledge or just data into future generations. It looks into how these communications can create a culture, as the humans have done with all the books, movies, machines, wars, variations in social structures that arise when communication can be recorded out of the moments of our lives and turned into systems of collective empowerment.
The question remains: what are all those other creatures doing?  

       

Foregone Books

 I did a video about the Russell Banks novels I have read.

He died on Jan 7, 2023

The Coldest Warmest Night (Fiction)

  The beautiful old apartment had windows on the east and west side of the room. This is an unusual feature for the city. To the cat sitter this was an enviable breezy luxury escape from the hot close humidity of Manhattan summers, but on this, coldest windiest night of the year, it wasn’t the greatest. The wind seemed to pass right through the windows. Nothing stops the wind. 

The cat sitter looked for any available spare blankets as the wind howled outside. He put on his microfiber long underwear, his knit hat, his socks, till finally, with piles of double bed sized blankets folded two layers for his single sleeping, he drifted to dreamland.

She is getting into bed with him, she really is, she was here. She came for the warmth. He needed warmth. She needed warmth. His warm heart welcomed her. 

(The same heart that had hardened itself when he had thought he needed to walk away, save her from the aging depleted self he had become. He couldn’t save his 19 year old mother from himself, but make up for it here.

It pained her to be saved. He couldn’t communicate these things to her. It was his worst mistake, a deeply regretful one after she had shown him what it feels like to have a lonely broken heart by cutting off all communication, freezing him out from his only real human contact. No she wouldn’t still be “friends”. It was a lesson he needed. It felt like a final, most important lesson that showed him what he was to women and what he had done to so many before her.) 

But now here she was. Open again, forgiving, willing to share their warmth. The freeze in the world more unbearable than that of their fears. This was the real, living creature reality. The need more powerful than the abstract self hating cold fear of his ultimate impoverished death that he had let drive him to separate.

She enters the bed to the warmth of the moment and that is all that is necessary.
That is all they need. No performance toward physical ecstasy, or possession, is necessary or welcome. Touch, tenderness, and warmth is all that is. All that is ever really wanted, all that is really needed, all that is beyond the fear and the culturally confining notions of what a man and a woman are, ought to be, or want. Nothing that had separated them is there, and never is it to return. There is no time for it to return. There is no time. They are one. He doesn’t understand, but at the same time, completely understands, and knows why she is here.

He woke as usual alone, the blankets were too warm and sliding off the side of the bed. The old man used the bathroom as he did it more than once each night he returned to the bed cuddling within himself. It wasn’t sad.

 
She is here in his forever, warm within him. Somehow he knew she knows miles away, connected. He was not a man to keep anything other than to keep moving. He hardly wanted to keep any memories. He would hold this dream of the dream that she was as long as he could.

He wanted o more human touch in his life. They had shown one another that touch only really causes mutual pain. He has turned away from all the complications of making dreams of connection a wholesome reality in a world that has imploded. His final movements,  attempts do escape that black hole.

The memory of soft skin, this dream reality is all he would ever dare to want again. 

------

"Hearts shaped like valentines aren't at all the fashion. What is more in demand are hearts with a bit of iron and a twist to the iron at that. A streamlined heart, say, with a claw like a hammer's claw, better used for ripping than for tapping at old repairs that's what's needed to get by these days. It's the new style in hearts. The non-corrugated kind don't wear well any longer."

Nelson Algren from his 1949 novel The Man with the Golden Arm

The Magic Kingdom by Russell Banks

 The new Russell Banks novel is an epic history of our times. Our times move fast. So an epic novel need not cover a multi-generational timeline of slow change. 

In The Magic Kingdom the sweeping change of times and physical landscape is shown in the environment of a single lifetime of one man.   

The character and first person narrator of the story is Harley Mann, an 82 years old resident of St. Cloud Florida. He was born in 1890. 
The set up of the novel is that in 1972 he recorded, on reel to reel tapes, the story of the first 20 or so years of his life. It is a very unusual story and life. 

He is the child of a family who lived in the Ruskin Colony in Tennessee and later in Waycross Georgia. These were designed to be utopian examples of how we could live in a more cooperative socialist structure.    
After the death of his father, child Harley moves with his mother, his twin brother, his other set of twin brothers, and baby sister to a dismal sort of plantation that is more or less a prison including overseers with bullwhips. 
It’s the system of indentured slavery where one can never work off the debt owed to the master of the place, a strange little rich man who lives in a mansion on the grounds. 

This family is rescued by a man who is the head of a Shaker community in the Florida Everglades. Elder John buys off the family debt and takes them to the New Bethany colony when Harley is around 11 and the story moves on from there. 

Early on in the novel Banks shows us a part of the history of the USA which is little known and actually not the kind of thing that our mainstream goes out of it way to show us, being more inclined to celebrate capitalism over socialist cooperative systems as if capitalism and the business community is really the only American Way.  The bulk of the story takes place in New Betheny and the nearby city of St Cloud. Although a mere 110 or so years ago the area was almost pioneer territory for these white oddball utopian Christian characters, the seminole people having been killed off or otherwise removed not that long before.    

Harley and family, coming from the Ruskin experience, are secular whereas the Shakers are very religious, although both the secular and neo-Christians want to live in a cooperative economic system. This is another instructive aspect of this fine novel. The reader gets a certain amount of information about what the Shakers were all about. We learn that the Shakers believed in Christ but also a woman who was an 18th Century founder of the sect and brought them from England to New York State. She established the Shaker celibacy. Though long dead she, Mother Ann Lee, is worshiped along with Christ. In The Magic Kingdom the Shakers colony can only survive via recruitment, being unable to reproduce new Shakers via bringing their own children into the religion. Although not clearly stated, that is the reason that Elder John rescued Harley and family from the plantation. These five children learn to become Shakers. They are free to accept the doctrine when they come of age, confess to the elder or woman elder. and then be Shakers and continue the colony. Or go elsewhere, live in The World.   

The Shakers reject profit from usury. But people are surrounded by economic challenges which can make their Biblical moral foundations sometimes on ground with sinkholes.    

The emotional heart of the story is an odd love that Harley finds and comes to cherish. The Magic Kingdom is a love story. A story of what humans will do for love, be it something justifiable or not, as a young man follows his heart.   

The core of the novel is this love and shame in a restrictive community. It is not at all a didactic slog about religious and cooperative communities.
It’s an involving page turner, a gripping story of a young man’s love.

All in the land of the corporate Magic Kingdom of Disney World only a few decades later.

Russell Banks remains one of our greatest novelist.